Over the last decade, Chvrches singer Lauren Mayberry’s lyrics have grown increasingly concerned with the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated industry. The duo’s 2021 album Screen Violence drew largely on the experiences that Mayberry has had with creeps and stalkers, and her first solo album, Vicious Creature, continues to pose difficult questions about life as a female musician in a business that forces her to admit, as she does “Change Shapes,” that “we’re all snakes.”
Vicious Creature allows Mayberry to more fully embrace the persona of a ruthless, take-no-shit diva that she adopted on Chvrches’s “Gun” and “We Sink.” On “Crocodile Tears,” she declares, “Maybe I’m a villain but find it kind of thrilling when you cry,” and she takes on the role of a femme fatale on “Mantra.” Based on an encounter with a well-known musician who spouted conspiracy theories, “Something in the Air” makes clear that finding happiness is hard enough without wasting time obsessing over the so-called shadowy forces behind 5G.
Chvrches’s music is defined by its embrace of synth-pop, but Mayberry explores a different set of influences here. The ballad “Oh, Mother,” for one, nods to Tori Amos’s brand of piano-pop, while “Sorry, Etc.” delves into rock, with organ and distorted bass standing in for guitars. But while the fried keyboards on “Change Shapes” and “Sorry, Etc.” punctuate Mayberry’s menace, the contrast between her biting lyrics and the generic-sounding synth strings and four-on-the-floor beat of “Crocodile Tears” feels like a failed attempt at irony.
With its slow crescendo and predictable structure, the closing ballad “Are You Awake” feels anticlimactic, ending an otherwise empowering album on an enervating note. Screen Violence employed myriad references to horror movies, with song titles like “Final Girl,” “Violent Delights,” and “Nightmares” to illustrate how grim being a woman in the world today can be. Vicious Creature, on the other hand, strains to live up to its title.
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